In some areas. If you go to say Denmark almost everyone under 30 can speak english. Almost everyone in the US for the past 30 years has at least had a class in Spanish.
But as low a bar as that is, 15 years, or even 100 years, is no where near enough time for even 50% of the population to achieve it.
Yep, you did say ‘kids’ and not ‘100 percent of the population’. I stand corrected and apologize. However, requiring Spanish, even if it is in most public school curricula, will not translate to all kids being bilingual in fifteen years, however loosely one defines bilingual. There are many isolated, rural communities in the US as well as those for which teaching Spanish, or any other language, provides little to no benefit to the local market, and this completely ignores the larger than zero percent of the population who will ensure their children are not ‘polluted’ by exposure to or inculcation by other languages and cultures.
And what percentage of Americans would you say are bilingual?
It’s law out here that high schoolers have to take a foreign language. It was in the early 90’s as well when I was in and not one of anyone I know* who did take a foreign language in HS remembers anything beyond what food you might buy at the store or order at the Mexican restuarant.
So even having eveyrone forced to take foreign language classes doesn’t translate in bilingualism.
*Except the lady who speaks Spanish, but that’s because Spanish was her first language and she took German with me in HS and we don’t remember jack excpet for words you might use at Oktoberfest.
Public school curricula in most states already includes a foreign language requirement. Some start as young as kindergarten. And yet, kids aren’t bilingual because it all disappears by the end of college.
There’s only one prediction I think I can make with any certainty: the majority of the cars on the road will be hybrids, plug-in hybrids, or electric. Gas-only will be phased out over the next decade and a half as people start looking for better gas mileage.
Heavily assisted driving of cars with self driving zones on the verge of appearing. I don’t see completely autonomous cars making the politically acceptable risk factor cut without some outside assistance.
Unskilled labor is under severe pressure from automation with likely a mix of both social changes and social friction as we continue to work through the change.
Cell phone saturation going down in urban areas as people start to shift to devices that use VOIP and wifi style connections as their primary means of communication.
Flying cars… will still be in science fiction and people will still be predicting them about the same number of decades out.
The old joke will still hold mostly true:
Lately I’ve been trying to think of common household objects that will be obsoleted within the next 20 years, and unknown 20 years later.
If you wake up from a coma in the US in 2030, I’d be willing to wager you will never see a can opener again.
The first octogenarian US president too.
I bloody hope there is a baldness cure, but I seriously doubt it
Self-driving cars.
There will be big arguments about reinstating Obamacare.
Few people will bother voting since big money rules both parties.
Climate-change deniers are still at it and the US is burning more fossil fuel than ever.
The internet will grind to a halt unless you pay through the nose for priority.
Unemployment will hit double digits and stay there.
The economy will have stagnated as hardly anyone has any money to buy anything.
A propos that last point, many many years ago I tried to figure out why North America (at least US and Canada) were so wealthy and Latin America so poor and decided that the most convincing explanation was that in every Latin country there were a few extremely wealthy families and everyone else was abjectly poor. I never found a better explanation. And this was decades before Piketty came along.
Although there is no cure for going bald, there is a remedy. Please read my “Ask the…” thread on my personal experiences with surgical follical transplantation.
Why do you think that? I suspect cans will have a sort of renaissance in the future, considering they’re highly recyclable and sturdy, and the infrastructure is already in place to produce and distribute them.
I suspect that by 2030 print newspapers will be one of those things that geezers have to go out of their way to get delivered… in the few places where they’re still printed at all. I suspect also that there’ll be a round or two of consolidation between the newspaper companies and the television networks who are owned by the same media companies- why have a newspaper website and a TV station website with two gangs of competing reporters working for the same ultimate company?
it depends on the defintion and what is ones “first” language. Many people are from Mexico, China, Korea, Phillipines, russia, Pakistan, etc… and thus speak those languages at home but english everywhere else. Those people are fully bilingual. Same with people who’ve lived around other populations alot so they picked up those languages and speak it well.
Now if your talking about people who know some French, Spanish, or German or whatever- but would have trouble holding a conversation in it, alot of people are like that. For example I can sort of get by in Spanish. We get most of what we learned in school.
I’d say nearly everyone I know knows SOME foreign words.
I’d say around 10% fully bilingual, maybe 50% somewhat bilingual.
Your 10% number sounds about right to me for Americans. I personally don’t believe there is such a thing as “somewhat bilingual.” Either one is bilingual or one is not. Just because you know some foreign words and can understand and speak certain phrases in a language does not make you bilingual in my estimation. For example, I can speak English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, and Hebrew, but I consider myself just quadrilingual because I am conversational, meaning I can hold a conversation with others at a normal pace, in English, Spanish, Japanese, and French only. Although I can understand a lot of German and Hebrew if I concentrate, and can make myself understood with some effort and a lot of hesitation as I try to come up with the right words, tenses, and grammar rules of the language on the fly, I certainly cannot hold a conversation at a normal pace in those languages and, truth be told, I have been losing my French for a while through years of non use, so perhaps I am really just trilingual at this point.
There’s also the concept of rule of law which is the subject of economic study and an international development focus. Piketty looked at distribution. Latin America tends to be relatively poor even by per capita GDP levels though. It’s not just distributional; they’re poor.
Thanks for reminding me to take a look at Piketty’s book though. /derail 
I remember a Scientific American article from earlier this year claiming this won’t happen and instead there would be a pool of jumbled traits all along the rainbow. For example, Tiger Woods, Obama, Blake Griffin, and Jason Kidd are all mixed.
Remember, we’re talking about 16 years from now, so the babies being born right now will be the teenagers in this scenario. So, no. Maybe in another hundred years, but 2030? Nope.
It’s nothing more than wild speculation, but I assume cans will all have pop-tops by then.